The Disability Action Research Kollective (DARK) is a disabled-led group working to make disability perspectives, history, and research more accessible to a general audience. Since its establishment in 2024, DARK has produced twelve zines on a range of topics related to disability, all of which are available digitally and in print. No previous experience is required to volunteer with DARK and the Kollective welcomes the input of disabled and non-disabled people. During this interview, DARK’s founder, Richard Amm, reflects on the origins and development of their zine-making project and the vital role it plays in communicating disabled people’s history through a politicised, non-medical lens.
What inspired the genesis of this project?
The Disability Action Research Kollective (DARK) began as a way to promote insights from academic disability scholarship into the public consciousness in a free and accessible format. Disability is often stripped away from historical figures when retelling their stories, so we began the work of reclaiming them as part of our history – not positioning disability as a shameful secret, but a way to restore people’s full humanity and help destigmatize disability in the modern day.
Academia is not accessible for many disabled people. The fundamental frameworks of education are surveilling, disciplinary, and exclusionary. Many of its procedures are also unnecessarily damaging to mental health. Overall, disabled people’s perspectives, experience and input on literature and discourse is limited, and is often marginalized by being pushed exclusively into Disability Studies.
DARK wanted to do research by our own rules, exploring new ways of creating and thinking. It is volunteer run, there are no deadlines, and workloads are dispersed to reduce burnout and build redundancies into our practices. The work centres disabled perspectives, pushing back against non-disabled people writing disabled histories, telling our stories. Disabled people have a right to a history and self-concept that is not entirely shaped by non-disabled people.
Why is illuminating disabled people as historical agents key to destigmatising disability in the present day?
It allows disabled people to see themselves and people like them in active roles in past societies and counteracts the narrative that we have always been marginalised and excluded. It also allows people to see disabled people accomplishing things, and being active members of society in a fully-realized, intersectional way, without reducing them to inspiration porn. In each zine, we explore people in their full lived experience, including their flaws and seemingly contradictory aspects. For example, Helen Keller was a Deaf and disabled person, but she was also actively involved with eugenics and had pro-communist views. Exploring narratives like this allows people to more fully see disabled people as people, and also shows us that society has not always viewed disabled people the way it does today. In the Ancient Egypt zine, we show a society that lasted for 5000 years that was very inclusive at multiple levels in society. It allows for the possibility that we were not always marginalised and disability was treated as part of everyday life; we were not always seen as a burden.
Why did you choose a zine format to communicate disabled people’s stories?
Ableism is discrimination in favour of non-disabled people. It has been fundamental in constructing the built environment, social institutions and cultural norms that exist today. Ableism is often used as a punchline; nobody takes it seriously because the oppression is normalised as an invisible standard. The idea of disabled people as a minority group that experiences oppression is far from widespread. While sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia are generally discussed within liberatory political movements, ableism is often overlooked and poorly understood even in supposedly radical and inclusive spaces. Disabled people offer valuable perspectives, and understanding how disability is intertwined and underlies many other forms of oppression is fundamental to addressing any of them. You can’t understand oppression in isolation.
Much of our early work was about disabled radicals: feminists, anarchists, communists, civil rights leaders, and anti-slavery activists. Disabled people have been a part of every liberatory movement in history. Zines already exist within many radical spaces today and seemed ideal as a medium with which to inject disability awareness into the places that most needed them and were most open to learning. Zines also offer a number of constraints that encourage content to be minimalist and compact, which help to make the content easier to digest. Cognitive accessibility is becoming increasingly more important as COVID damages attention spans. Disability-related content and keywords often have their reach limited and downgraded on online social networks, so a more physical approach was required. Zines are simple and cheap to produce in bulk, which allow the ideas to reach to a larger audience than via traditional, academic and trade publishing. If somebody sends you a link, it might end up in a tab that gets closed without having read it, but if you put a zine in your pocket, it will keep showing up. It was also a format that anyone could print at home, was decentralised, free, and the DIY punk spirit associated with them seemed a good fit.
DARK has twelve publications completed and has plans for at least a hundred more. Currently available publications include disability in ancient Egypt; a history of the wheelchair from the year 500 AD; biographies of disabled radicals; exploring why the gap exists on UK trains; disabled gods from world mythology; tools for analysing disability portrayals in film; and a disabled critique of the utopia in Star Trek. Publications currently in development include short biographies of disabled leaders, exploring the intersection between sexism and ableism, and a reader’s digest with summaries of radical books.
Why is it important to explore disability history through a non-medical lens and what can be achieved by doing this?
It is important to explore disability history though a non-medical lens because it directly impacts the rights of disabled people in the present day. The goal of DARK is to help people understand disability as a fluid political category, not merely a concrete medical one. The medical lens was not built for, or by, disabled people, yet it is the primary model for conceptualising disabled people, formulating the disabled person as a depoliticised individual who is broken and in need of fixing. The individualisation of systemic problems is a common feature of capitalism, and the medical model helps perpetuate that for a variety of minority groups. Examples include the psychiatric diagnoses of ‘hysteria’ for women who wanted equal rights; ‘drapetomania’ of enslaved people who wanted freedom; and politically weaponised psychiatric diagnoses to justify the incarceration of civil rights activists. The medicalisation of natural variation is also evident in how being homosexual was classified as a mental illness until recently.
The medical model also frames impairment as making the existence of the individual so undesirable as to justify preventing them from being born, as evidenced by the UK policy, introduced in 1967, of allowing late term abortions for disabled foetuses up until birth, while disallowing the same for foetuses presumed to be non-disabled. The forced sterilisation of disabled people, which began in 1880, is still legal in many areas today, including the USA and the EU. The social, economic, and structural forces that incentivised the sterilisation and murder of disabled people during the eugenics of the 1930s are still in place today.
One of the primary frameworks developed by disabled people themselves is the social model of disability. Its early form can be found in the essay ‘Disability – A Capitalist By-product’ by The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation. It posits that disability is fundamentally political and actively socially constructed. This separates impairment present within bodyminds from the socially constructed concept of disability – with society understood as having disabling effects on people who have impairments though prejudicial discrimination, structural exclusion, and infrastructural barriers. For example, a wheelchair user may have a mobility impairment, but society constructs inaccessible public transport and social norms that make hiring wheelchair users undesirable.
Has the Covid-19 pandemic influenced the project’s methods or objectives in any way?
SARS-COV-2 changed the world forever in ways many are yet to fully accept. The continued circulation of the virus is causing long-term neurological issues, reducing attention spans, memory, emotional control, and causing debilitating fatigue. So there are likely to be many newly disabled people who will benefit from having simplified, cognitively accessible content about disability to shape their new self-concepts. Historically, in the wake of wars – when the number of disabled people drastically increased in the population – there was an expansion of disability rights legislation. Institutional responses so far have instead included cutting social supports and expanding assisted suicide legislation. This underlines that there has never been a more important time for an accessible, disability-focused political education, something which this project hopes to provide, alongside engaging and entertaining content.
Follow this link to view all of DARK’s current zines and subscribe to future publications.